mothballed

It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.

There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response

1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)

2) Irreversibility.

3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.

4) Lowered friction for international transaction

5) One or both sides can be unbanked.

This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.

If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.

Ballot initiative. Californians tried that to stop "gay marriage" (Prop 8) so the courts just told the people to fuck themselves and overturned it. Again in South Dakota for legalizing marijuana, the voters voted in favor by special initiative so the state just overturned it.

Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.

I used to have a good friend that was a stripper (I promise, I wasn't the client...). Some of her biggest customers were people that wanted therapy without the paper trail of going to a licensed therapist. This is a big thing for pilots as well, since their health records and mental care are intensely scrutinized. A stripper will provide comfort, verbal relief, and physical love for $100 hour you can tell them anything and their reputation is bad enough no one will bother to believe them if they say something bad about you.

Banks are probably the most Orwellian surveillance apparatus of all. Almost every time I read an arrest warrant there is a whole section where banking records are used to damn someone. The equivalent level of banking privacy to graphene is roughly walking in to the teller to withdraw a few thousand cash once a month and then paying literally everything with that (or an anonymized crypto).

They are mandated to report child abuse. It is the same story with doctors, if an abusive parent brings in a child for care they learn never to give the kid healthcare again after the doctor reports it. It is rooted in good intentions but the effect is it means abused children never get to see doctors, therapists, get a half-ass minimal homeschool instead of going to school, etc so that mandated reporters never enter the picture.

The age of consent in the PI was like 14 until a couple years ago when they changed it to roughly match international norms, in their culture it was considered consensual rather than abuse until very recently.

There is no check on leaving, and our neighbor Mexico not only usually doesn't check, it's constitution* explicitly prohibits requiring passports for entry. And when you return US has to take you back, if citizen, passport or not. So you can easily go to and from Mexico without passport.

Virtually every time I go to Mexico, I'm one of very small % with passport going either direction.

* This is debated and some questionable court cases that actually protected rights of indigenous Mexicans to travel are cited as reasons why this constitutional provision isn't in effect (even though the case was clearly written to protect indigenous rather than justify overthrowing the constitution), but go to a land border with Mexico and 9 of 10 times I find they follow the constitution and don't check passport.

It's a thing in all of Africa. Even a bunch of the crazy Liberian warlord guys were US educated. Maybe less so today but anybody with money in Africa used to migrate to the US to study and then come back with the prestige of the credentials.

President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu was literally a US-migrated Nigerian, studying here for college and then working. Maybe you are not familiar with Nigeria, but a surprisingly large amount of those with legislative power have lived or held property in the US. You don't even have to "migrate" to buy property here, just show up, and you can leave (or do it remotely).

  Tinubu arrived in the United States in 1975, where he commenced undergraduate studies first at Richard J. Daley College in Chicago and then at Chicago State University where he majored in accounting and management. He worked odd jobs as a dishwasher, night security guard and cab driver to support himself through college.[13] He made the honor dean's list as an undergraduate and taught remedial class tutorials, some of his classmates credited his lectures for their improved grades. Tinubu was the university accounting society president in his senior year. His cumulative GPA was 3.54.[13] Tinubu graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in 1979.[14][15]

  Early career
  After graduating, Tinubu worked as an accountant for the American companies Arthur Andersen, Deloitte and GTE Services Corporation.[16][17]

What's really interesting is the extreme hypocrites like Nigerians that will show up and buy US property but then outlawing you from doing the same thing in their country because they don't want Americans or others doing the thing they did.

Passport card can be revoked over fairly small amounts of late child support which applies to a surprisingly large portion of America, particularly historically oppressed minorities. It would be quite foolish to rely on that for identification if you have children as a simple divorce could put you in instant arrears and cause you to lose your ID.

Hedging events with poor or no insurance penetration. For instance, suppose you had to pre-pay in advance for a venue for Spanish soccer finals game party before you know if they go to finals, you might hedge your position by betting against them going to the finals, especially if the chance was very high as a small premium would protect you against a total loss.

Another common one is war. Most insurances don't cover acts of war. Getting underwriting can be difficult especially for smaller amounts / people with little access to finance industry. Betting on war can hedge real estate or other exposed holdings.

The government is very efficient at redistributing your SS money from young broke workers to old more well off SS recipients. And at converting $ into guided missiles that blow up Iranian girls' schools. It's just that it's not practically possible to have "representatives" that actually represent the people in muh democracy in USA. See the massive unprecedent money that got poured in to make Massie lose his primary when he acted against the interest of Israel and to expose pedophiles in power.

I did that for much of my 20s and very glad I did. You are basically used parasitically by the Obamacare system as it caps the differential between young and elderly to the point it's well into the expected negative value, and you're young enough that the off chance of the bet going bad only results in declaring bankruptcy on a few years of professional salary.

There are levels of depression (or other circumstances) at which people are actual drains on their family. While I would never recommend suicide, it is a rational personal choice for some of those with severe health problems that for whatever reason (financial, insurance, whatever) cannot be fixed.

I would characterize Belize as part of the Anglosphere instead of Latin America. Last colonized by Britain as their last European influence on governance and only English as the official language. The anglosphere has the nastiest border controls in my experience.

Airlines are fined for inadmissible passengers. Whether they have a visa or not. If they have no visa but are admitted there is no such fine.

The visa is immaterial to the fine unless it conveys something beyond merely allowing you to present at a port of entry, which is allowed to basically everyone.

The average US border official is just like the average official(and non-official) anywhere;

False. CBP is well known as bottom rung in terms of hiring of federal LEO and an employer of last resorts. For example, one of the most prestigious is the Marshals Service, and for instance HSI is typically far closer to "average" or above than CBP is. If you're dealing with something like a DEA or FBI agent that is roughly 'average' and CBP you are roughly dealing with the 'moron' end and roughly the professional and intelligence opposite of the Marshals.

The EU is very sporadic. I walked straight into Sweden from a flight from Iraq and customs was not even there, and passport control waved everyone through with the most cursory of glances.

The average US border official is a (angry) moron (with a badge and a gun). They've literally fingerprinted me on entry with a US passport because they were too stupid to figure out US citizens don't have to do that. I have been interrogated by CBP to ask if I "work in the country" despite being a citizen. Anything that changes the process from the simplest one-size-fits all will be fucked up, they cannot differentiate the process between foreigner and citizen let alone EU vs some other place.

Edit: Every time I share my border stories I get accused of lying or having done something wrong. I have much much crazier ones. No one believes it until it happens to them. Count yourself lucky if you've never been strip searched or imprisoned by these psychopaths, any belief they are reasonable are formed because you were lucky and have a naïve sort of optimism that if you do everything right it won't happen to you.

It is legal to show up at a port of entry without any sort of anything. If all it allows you to do is show up at the port of entry it's a worthless scrap of paper.

That's interesting. In blue collar parts of USA it is not too bad to get a truck stop in. Truckers are a constant flow of money into town that is welcomed, and more importantly they just stop at the highway exit area and then get the fuck out after shedding their currency without going into actual town where the residents live.

4 trips a year picking up a heavy excavator or tractor so you dont have to pay a tradesman a gazillion dollars and it pays for itself. "But just pay someone to haul it or rent a truck" lmao good fucking luck down my dirt roads

Do everything yourself and it never touches commercial regulations on licensing, inspection, and and building plans. I recorded a sworn affidavit with the county I was building it myself on my own property for purely personal residential use and then they issued me a permit explicitly stating I did not need to submit building plans or inspections.

Since the house was built without any compensation and not used for any commercial purpose, it bypasses "commerce" which was the auspice under which housing was regulated. When I was done I literally just sent the county a picture of a house and they closed the permit and that was that.

Yes

edit: as a comment, there are a lot of people in places like big island hawaii for instance, that do something like this under burner LLCs with shipping containers, then just move them when caught and do the same thing over again.

Last I checked 5 or so years ago a lot big enough to drop a yurt on in San Francisco was only like 100k. Legally unbuildable, but perfectly usable and sanitary with an incinerator toilet, solar, and hauled water. Maybe 200k all in, in roughly the most expensive place in the US.